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The Department of Veterans Affairs has made strides toward increasing the number of disability claims it can process every year. But new claims from veterans are growing even faster than ever. House legislators are frustrated by the VA's lack of progress over the years.

The VA goes to Congressional hearing year after year with promises and no results. Furthermore, Congress never asks for proof regarding the statements that are made. I have served with the VA for 16 years. The gathering of evidence has been faster than ever before. The military has the Defense Personnel Records Imaging System (DPRIS) which allows us to get service records in hours. The National Personnel Records Center (NPRC) has digitized their records and documents are received within weeks for most records. The Social Security Administration records are received within a month and are received on a disk, but VBA prints the information and place it in a claims folder. The time limit for veterans to submit evidence was changed from 60 to 30 days a few years ago. Private medical evidence are receive for the most part within 30 days. VBA has electronic access to the VAMC medical records and that has been since the 1990’s. However, VBA uploads these records and place it into its own system called Virtual VA. Years ago the VBA coined the phrase seamless VA. Why take records from one electronic system and place it in another. The decision makers don’t really know if all the necessary records were uploaded from the VAMC and often refer back to the VAMC system to make sure. As to thumbing through records, she is also clueless. USB Hickey is really out of touch with what happening. As to training, at a Congressional hearing on September 13, 2006, VA briefed the VA US Committee that training was critical and it had instituted a 70 hours mandatory technical training for its employees. Today, there is 85 hours of mandatory technical training. Why the Oakland office had to be shut down for training is a leadership problem and no Senior Executive has been held accountable. As to the issue of paperless, the Winston Salem office who handles BDD cases (claims submitted by soldiers up 6 months not less than 2 months prior to discharge has been paperless for years. The BDD cases are backlogged. The Quick start program (claims submitted by soldiers discharged within 60 days) is backlogged. There are 1.7 million veterans signed up for E-benefits. Ask them what information they received when they go to E-benefits. When you have more than 1.5 million claims and no one knows the amount of claims that have not been established in the system, E-Benefits only will give you the same claims update over and over again. By the way, there are 23 million veterans in this Country. If anyone wants to know the truth about what happens on a daily basis at these 56 mini VBAs not Regional Offices because they all do their own thing, please ask the employees who have to try and deposit money into the VBA bank so that there will be sufficient funds to cover the unrealistic promises that VBA is making. The claims process is bankrupt and is a National Crisis. If someone does not stop this transformation initiative with no plan, claims process will sink deeper and deeper in bankruptcy. Please verify the information VBA leadership is spreading. The promises are unrealistic and information that is being shared is not credible.

I've seen how the records are set up. I recently asked under the PRivacy Act for a copy of my records. After not responding for more than 120 days, I escalated it to a Privacy Act appeal. I finally received the records by a UPS shipment. The over 500 pages of records were not in order, contained multiple duplicates, and were not indexed in either a paper or an electronic fashion.
I took the time to actually put the records into a usable style. Records, letters, rating decisions, deferred rating decisions, and other documents are now in a bookmarked PDF file. The file is OCR indexed. The main document even has Bates numbering and is password secured.
Recently, I've been scheduled for a take-2 of a C&P orthopedic examination. Because of the more than 30 hours of work in putting file together, I can walk into the doctor's office and present the supporting material in a manner that the doctor can see the full history of the orthopedic event from 1995 to the present.
It would be nice if the VA took the same level of care in the maintenance of their official records.